If we find animals different from us and historically dangerous animals SCARY (many legs, no legs, insects, venomous species, etc), why do we find FLUFFY and FURRY animals CUTE when WE are practically hairless? Why are bears cute when they have historically posed great threat to us?

Question

Lot of hairy and fluffy looking organisms are also dangerous too… like those worms, bears, some plants, etc

In: 2

Answer 1

Its my own personal theory but it’s two major elements. **The face** and the element of **predictability**. Survival wise, Humans are trained to identify faces, even when there isn’t one, and have an innate fear/distrust/adverse reaction to things they cant predict.

So take a Bear. Dangerous yes, but even a Bear has eyes, ears, and mouth. The eyes in particular are a great window into emotions. They move how we expect them to, and express emotions like we expect them too. Their size and claws make us careful and understand their danger, but we’re not freaked out on a subconscious level.

Then compare a spider. No disenable face, impossible to read its emotions, about as far from a human as you can possibly get. It’s that lack of familiarity and predictability. I think that’s also why we don’t like how they jump from super still to really fast in bursts, makes them even less easy to read.

In the wild its the cautious that survive, and part of that instinct was this gut feeling to avoid things are are totally alien and unreadable.